The Amstrad CPC use the General Instrument AY-3-8912 sound chip, providing 3 channels, each configurable to generate square waves, white noise or both. A small array of hardware volume envelopes are available. The C64 use the SID sound chip with also 3 channels, each configurable to generate 4 different waves forms : sawtooth, triangle, pulse, noise. It offers other features, much more than the AY-3-8912.

So is it possible to listen to SID music on an limited Amstrad CPC ? The answer is yes, and if you are lucky enough to read french, you will be able to read the article "les SID-Voices" on Quasar. So to resume, yes you can do it on a plain Amstrad CPC, but if you play 3 SID-Voices, you wont have enough CPU time to do something else. Otherwise on an Amstrad CPC+ using the DMA, you will be able to do something else than playing music. The Quasar article comes with the AY+ source to play SID-Voices on a CPC+. On a plain Amstrad CPC, you can use a program by Geco, a hungarian programmer. He usually works on the Elan enterprise, he wrote a SID player for this computer, and ported it to the Amstrad CPC. Download this Amstrad CPC SID player (128 Kb only).

Some informations about this utility directly from the author (taken from chipmusic.org) : I created the player used 6510 emulation code of Simon Owen, and CPC header checking. The player spends a lot of time with 6510 code, this is the reason of speed changing on CPC, on Enterprise I met less speed changing, may be the cause of this on EP the processor is running at 4Mhz if the code is not in the video Memory. Yes, only some feature is emulated, frequency registers, envelopes in 50Hz, control registers (without wave formats), and volume register, if I remember well. And the noise emulation is also interesting on CPC, because when noise should apply then I give fix 0f value to noise channel, and drive the frequency with tone channel frequency (set reg 6 tone and noise enable on a channel), with this solution 3 different noises can appear on the AY. The player can play songs in 2 speeds, 50Hz, and 100Hz, does not matter of SID speed, ex if the speed of SID is 60Hz the player plays it on 50Hz.

Finally, you can play it hard too, with an extension. Read about it on CPCWiki (a bit of drama included).

WYZTracker is a tool developed by Augusto Ruiz (interface in english and spanish), from Retroworks, that can be used to compose music for WYZPlayer.

WYZPlayer is a Z80 player for the AY-3-8910 sound chip (a 3-voice PSG : Programmable Sound Generator designed by General Instrument) used by (and for) the Amstrad CPC, MSX and Spectrum. It can be used for games and demos due to its minimal use of CPU and RAM, the player takes little code and all musics are compressed.

Finally, you can use cpcwyzlib by Raul Simarro, an Amstrad CPC library to play wyztracker tunes with SDCC. He also wrote the cpcrslib used with z88dk.

A new release candidate of the ANSI-C compiler SDCC v3.2.0 RC1 is available for download.

You will find on CPCMANIA 3 new SDCC tutorials :

• using sprites in Z80 asm and C (spanish tutorial)
• SDCC vs z88dk : Comparing size and speed of the binaries generated for Amstrad CPC (z88dk link) (spanish tutorial)
• converting and displaying an image on the screen (spanish tutorial)

You will find on Phenix Informatique an interview of Alain Massoumipour (alias Poum) who wrote for the french Amstrad CPC magazine Amstrad 100%.

If you throwed all your issues of Amstrad 100%, you will find them on le site des anciennes revues informatiques.

You will find an interview of Marc Maulin, co-author of the Amstrad CPC utility Discology, on CPC Rulez.

There is an interesting article on Octoate which shows how to add a bluetooth module on the CPC Booster+ made by Antitec.

Informations, software and manual for the CPC Booster+ are available on CPC Wiki.

A work in progress version of GrafX2 is available to draw "mode 5" pictures for Amstrad CPC.

GrafX2 is a bitmap paint program inspired by the Amiga programs Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. Specialized in 256-color drawing, it includes a very large number of tools and effects that make it particularly suitable for pixel art, game graphics, and generally any detailed graphics painted with a mouse. The program is mostly developed on Linux and Windows, but is also portable on many other platforms.

As announced in march, the remake of the Amstrad CPC game is now available on Iphone and Ipad under the name Tuniques bleues : nord vs sud.

There are 2 versions, the first one at 1,99 € and the other one at 2,99 €, I couldnt see at first glance their differences.

Talking about the Mojons Twins, I went to their web site and found their latest Amstrad CPC game : Uwol 2 Quest for money.

As usual, you can also download the source of the game if you are curious.

Looking on Itunes in the apps store with the Amstrad keyword, I was surprised to see an iOS application written by Manuel F. Garcia CABELLO (ZX Nostalgia Arcade edition volume 1 : The Mojons Twins) which let you playing several game written by The Mojons Twins, who are prolific authors of ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC games.